Hulu iPhone App “Badass?” I Doubt it.

I love Hulu, that’s no secret.

And I’ve been antsy for Hulu access on my iPhone for a long time (since I started using Hulu, in fact), but I just can’t bring myself to get excited for the (allegedly) forthcoming Hulu app for iPhone. The main drawback of Hulu, for me, is that it’s all but tied to your desktop or laptop machine (Boxee and related hacks notwithstanding). If your connection dies or you travel somewhere without Wi-Fi, Hulu (like all cloud services) is just a pie in the sky.

“Hulu would be perfect,” I’d say, “if only I could download shows in my queue to watch on my iPhone while I commute to work on the subway.” Until Hulu does that, I’ve no choice but to purchase TV and video content from the iTunes Store and sync it to my iPhone (one could also go the less savory direction of downloading illegal torrents and converting them to iPod-compatible video files).

Ad-supported downloadable video is what I’m looking for. And I would probably be willing to entertain a nominal monthly fee for the privilege.

But an iPhone app - however “badass” it purports to be - that merely provides the ability to stream relatively-low-quality video over 3G or Wi-Fi connections that can in nearly all instances be found in just slightly-lower-quality on the native YouTube application, is just not all that interesting to me.

You Got Ripped Off By Your Web Designer

No matter how little you paid, you paid too much.

Non-profit organizations and governmental agencies are easy targets for evil web designers who spend more time with their own promotion and SEO than actually designing, and whose sites end up being a mess of templated code from some out-of-the-box Site Builder, fail to pass any sort of smell test for W3C validation or accessibility guidelines, display like crap on all but the oldest browsers, and pretty much suck the life out of anyone unfortunate enough to stumble on them.

Below are 5 organizations whose websites are not worth any price they may have paid, and in fact may be losing them money and hurting their reputation. I feel bad for them. And angry at the douchebags who got paid to create them.

If you’re a designer/developer with a heart, consider searching out one of these (or similar) entities once a year and offer your services on a charity basis. It’s truly some of the most edifying work out there.

United States Department of the Treasury
Take a look at that lefthand nav! And the bulleted lists in the righthand sidebar! And the way the content section explodes out the right side of the container!

Nye Communities Coalition
Nothing really to say about this one except “Scales?!!”

ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training
Seems fine if your browser window is tiny, awful when it’s stretched wider, and when you realize the navigation is in the Selection box at the bottom of the page, you’ll flip and consider trying to find application information on the site of its sister school in Russia, even if you don’t know the language!

Metropolitan Transportation Authority
(Perhaps the best of the worst on this page, but awful compared with other transit orgs, and with enough animated GIFs to screw in a lightbulb.

Pahrump Valley Times
Local Newspaper sites: terrible across the board. Maybe the saddest on this list, as they represent (for me) the direction traditional journalism should head to keep itself from dying off completely.

Free Blog Template: The Second Thing Returns

In December of 2007, I released a free Blogger blog template called “The Second Thing” that ended up getting picked up by a bunch of template sites, and downloaded by a ton of bloggers, and there’s some truly awesome stuff happening within the soft, green walls of this XHTML and CSS monster.

But one request I received more than anything else was this: “Can you release a version without the Il Primo and Il Secondo headers?”

Well it took awhile, but here it is, in all its glory, “The Second Thing Returns Free Blogger Template”

(Looks just like this, except without the headings.)

Please feel free to download the XML file (which you’ll then use on your blog by unzipping it to your desktop, and then from your Blogger dashboard click on Template > Edit HTML > Browse for the file on your computer > Upload), share it with your friends, and edit it to your heart’s content. All I ask in return is that you link back to this post and share your work with everyone in the comments.

Questions? Comments? Problems?
Leave a comment below or email me.